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S A S H A C R AW F O R D - H O L L A N D

The Birth of a Nation in Canada: Black Protest and White Denialism across Canada’s Color Lines

ABSTR ACT: This study investigates how The Birth of a Nation’s Canadian exhibition and

reception shaped Canada’s racial formation during a decisive period of nation building.

The notoriously racist film took Canada by storm despite national mythologies founded

on principles of equality and compassion. While Black Canadians grounded their protests

against the film in patriotic ideals, white Canadians brandished those ideals as evidence of

the protests’ redundancy. Analyzing historical discourse in mainstream newspapers, the

Black press, trade publications, and censorship documents, I investigate how seemingly

benevolent, Canadian modalities of racism enabled this white-supremacist film to triumph

north of the border.

KEYWORDS: The Birth of a Nation (1915), transnational, reception, Black activism,

Canadian audiences, censorship, World War I, national identity, anti-Black racism, white

supremacy, liberalism

“We see in the United States what grave problems may arise from the presence of a race unable to become full members of the same social family as ourselves.”

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Ca na da (Liber a l), 1910

“The long history of anti-Blackness in Canada has, for the most part, occurred alongside the disavowal of its existence.”

Roby n M ay na r d, w riter, activ ist, a nd educator, 2017

In recent years, racist events in Canada—from police killing Black and Indig- enous people to evidence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wearing blackface and brownface—have grabbed international headlines and provoked national conversations about Canadian racism. Yet efforts to dismantle racist systems have been repeatedly hindered by those who dwell on the more elementary

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question of whether Canada or its institutions can be accurately described as racist, especially when compared to the United States. This recurring incredulity at the prospect of racism in Canada occurs because it contradicts widely cher- ished mythologies of Canadian equality and compassion. As Cheryl Thompson argued in the aftermath of Trudeau’s blackface scandal, “acknowledging the reality—that we have race issues in Canada—would mean we’d have to admit to the world, and to ourselves, that we haven’t lived up to our own mythology.”1 This essay examines a part of Canada’s racist history: the exhibition and reception of D. W. Griffith’s notorious epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) across the coun- try. The rapturous response to this explicitly white-nationalist American film demonstrates that virulent anti-Blackness was a sanctioned and central feature of popular entertainment in Canada from 1915 to 1917. But in order to explain how white Canada could embrace Birth’s Southern Confederate ideology, I argue that subtler, Canadian modalities of racism were integral to its flourishing north of the border. I find that patriotic denialism is neither a new nor an innocent phenomenon but has a long history of obstructing racial reckonings and insulat- ing white supremacy through its obstinate adherence to Canada’s superficially admirable myths.

As film historians know well, The Birth of a Nation consolidated nascent cultural, economic, and formal features of the commercial film industry that has since become known as Hollywood. It is commonly regarded, explains Linda Williams, “as the film in which the movies themselves were born.”2 Birth narrates a white-supremacist version of the Civil War and Reconstruction according to which the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) rescued the white South from the anarchy of Black emancipation. Griffith animates a cast of blackface carica- tures and misogynistic tropes popularizing structures of difference that have continued to populate film screens for more than a century. Most notoriously, Griffith conjures the threat of Black male sexuality to authorize the lynching of Black men and the domestication of white women. Birth famously catalyzed the twentieth-century rebirth of the KKK, and more insidiously, its recounting of the Civil War on the fiftieth anniversary of the South’s surrender fortified an incipient racial order in 1915 America. Based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Birth racialized the system of cinematic expression that Griffith had developed over the previous decade by equating the rescue of a damsel in distress to the rescue of the white nation. During a moment when the contours of whiteness were being extended to include certain European immigrants, Birth erected Blackness as a threat against which an unstable white identity could cohere. While radical in its industrial, cultural, and aesthetic contributions to cinema, Birth’s ideology was not considered to be politically extreme by most white people who saw the

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film; it simply crystallized and perpetuated the racial tropes that were coming to structure American and Canadian politics alike, becoming the most popular and profitable film of cinema’s first decades.3

Black Americans and Black Canadians understood that this film was not only offensive but also endangered their lives. In mounting challenges to Birth’s exhibition, they shared resources through a growing number of institutions dedicated to combatting racial oppression in each country. However, import- ant differences between Canada and the US also distinguished these protests and the responses to them. Birth produced a fantasy of Blackness that seemed to demand white domination, exemplifying a tendency throughout American history to manage racial discord through explicit hierarchy; it was primarily by underscoring the film’s danger to a fragile social order that African Americans successfully argued for bans in certain regions. By contrast, Canadian mytholo- gies inherited from British imperial ideals furnished the grounds on which Black Canadians could make claims to national belonging. They opposed Birth in overtly nationalistic language that drew sharp distinctions between the reality of American racial tyranny and the promise of Canadian freedom.

White Canadian defenses of Birth were articulated in nationalist terms as well and took precedence over protestors’ grievances. Their forms of patriotic dismissal demonstrate how overt white supremacy was complemented by a dis- tinctly Canadian brand of racism that operates through denial and conditional inclusion. In the United States, protests against Birth were met with defenses of the right to free speech; in Canada, they were met with assurances that the violence depicted onscreen was a foreign problem. These rebuttals exemplify two distinct national traditions of racism: while hate speech in America is conventionally justified as an expression of freedom, accusations of racism in Canada are typically deflected on the circular basis that Canada is not a racist country. Birth’s explicitly white-nationalist call to arms was ushered through Canada by this latter, more insidious form of white supremacy so committed to national myths of egalitarianism that it refuses to acknowledge when reality contradicts those ideals. By tracking the interplay of Black grievances and white disavowals across Birth’s Canadian premieres, I find that the compulsion to romanticize Canada and deflect accusations of racism south to the US has long obstructed any earnest engagement with the histories and present of anti-Black violence in Canada.

This essay departs from previous accounts of Birth’s Canadian exhibition and reception, situating this episode as a contest over the wartime emergence of national ideals that both structured and disavowed Canadian anti-Blackness. Melvyn Stokes has outlined Birth’s Canadian exhibition to demonstrate that the film itself changed as it traveled internationally, altered by regional censors’

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cuts, bilingual intertitles, and a compensatory epilogue.4 This article builds on Stokes’s comparative approach to Birth’s textual instability by examining how paratextual elements adapted this supremely American film to Canadian ide- ologies. In another account of this history, Greg Marquis shows that Canadian reactions to Birth reflected Black Canadians’ exclusion from the supposedly egalitarian promises of citizenship.5 This analysis must be extended to attend more completely to the discourses that Black Canadians mobilized against Birth and to the grounds on which their grievances were dismissed; only then can we understand how specifically Canadian formations of race and racism were being negotiated through Birth’s journey northward. As I illustrate in the first section, press and exhibitors made the film resonate in Canada by highlighting its relevance to a nation that was defining its own ethnonational identity during this period. Next, I examine how Black Canadians protesting Birth made claims to national belonging that reflected their circumstances as formerly enslaved people oppressed in a nation that imagined itself to be a safe haven from racial terror. The subsequent section demonstrates that white Canadians dismissed these claims by investing in a set of possibly well-intentioned but fundamentally harmful discourses that idealized Canada and ignored its reality while adorning white supremacy with a benevolent façade. Finally, as I trace Birth’s rhetorical legacy in Canada, I show that this maneuver by which liberal ideals shroud racist realities was a chronic trademark of nation building during this critical period in the construction of Canadian identity.

CINEMATIC NATIONALISM

Birth’s Canadian runs were among its most successful outside the United States. Despite initial concerns that its American story would not appeal to Canadian audiences, Birth played in every major city and many towns throughout Can- ada, filling theaters, hockey arenas, and town halls to capacity and breaking countless audience records.6 As in the US, Birth was exhibited in opulent ven- ues that elevated cinema’s cultural status, accompanied by a traveling staff of mechanics, cutting-edge projection technology, live sound effects, and a thirty- piece orchestra. Promotional materials framed its presentation as a singular cultural event: the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” “the greatest art conquest since the beginning of civilization,” “so far beyond anything our stage has ever known that the usual avenues of comparison do not offer a road to follow in this instance” (fig. 1).7

Griffith’s distribution company, Epoch, booked Birth’s premiere in Ottawa before selling exclusive Canadian exhibition rights to Basil Courtney’s Basil Corporation.8 A weeklong premiere run began on September 13, 1915, after which Courtney launched simultaneous road-show exhibitions from Toronto

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Fig. 1: Advertisements for Birth’s premiere run in Toronto. (Toronto Globe, September 15, 1915, 2; Toronto Star, September 25, 1915, 12; Toronto Star, October 2, 1915, 7)

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and Montreal. Birth’s Toronto debut defied expectations, repeatedly filling the 1500-seat Royal Alexandra Theatre to capacity. The theater’s manager com- pensated an incoming production to cancel their show so that he could extend Birth’s run to three, then four weeks.9 Crowds of hopeful spectators lined up at the box office every day of the extended run and were often turned away, break- ing records in a city where traveling theatrical attractions had never stayed longer than two weeks.10 Moving Picture World marveled at Birth’s “triumph in a city which boasted it would never accept two dollar pictures.”11 Within a few months, the film had played to more than 30 percent of Toronto’s popula- tion—a record “never before attained here by any production, no matter how big.”12 Concurrently, audiences packed the Montreal Arena—one of the first dedicated hockey arenas, which a “small army” converted into a theater after a fire destroyed Birth’s intended Montreal venue, the Princess Theatre.13 This suspected arson provoked “considerable gossip” and a police investigation, hav- ing occurred the day after Black Montrealers met to organize their opposition to the film, though the resolution they adopted only expressed an intent to use “legitimate” means to prevent the screening.14 More than twenty thousand Montrealers saw Birth during its first week, which was extended to three. The following month, it played at the brand-new Théâtre Saint-Denis with, “for the first time in the whole world,” both French and English intertitles.15

Following these parallel triumphs, Birth traversed the country. Courtney sometimes traveled with the production, receiving enthusiastic welcomes when he did.16 The Toronto show toured through southwestern Ontario before head- ing east through Quebec to Atlantic Canada. The Montreal production traveled west to Ontario and through the Prairies to British Columbia. The shows then meandered through smaller cities and towns, allowing the film’s reach to extend well beyond urban audiences. Canadians in rural areas made use of specially chartered transportation or traveled independently to small theaters nearby.17 Across the country, newspapers promoted the film’s educational value and theater managers arranged special rates for school groups, leading a grateful child in Nova Scotia to reflect that “this was a special favor as they do not let us go into town often.”18 Advertisements for The Clansman populated Canadian newspapers (including a list of “Breezy Vacation Reading”) and Birth became a paragon of success commonly referenced in the promotion of other films.19 By January 1918, after multiple transcontinental trips, Birth had been viewed by more Canadians than “any other presentation, either film or speaking.”20

Trade publications detailed Courtney’s triumphs and reported regularly on the Canadian records Birth broke to demonstrate that the film was “an inexhaustible gold mine” (fig. 2).21 Although he was primarily a banker with few long-term connections to the film industry, Courtney’s enormous payoff

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on this risky investment demonstrated to Canadian exhibitors that select films could pack theaters for years of repeated showings.22 Birth also inspired the establishment of dozens of Canadian feature film production companies.23 Its white-nationalist message may have contradicted Canadian principles of equality, but it stimulated an emerging domestic industry struggling against American monopolies. While skeptics had initially doubted Birth’s Canadian appeal, its record-breaking engagements across Canada indicated that “the thrilling intensity of the work of the Ku Klux Klan” captivated viewers on both sides of the border.24

Fig. 2: Advertisement targeting prospective exhibitors in 1924 by highlighting that nine years after its release, Birth could still draw packed houses in Toronto. (Exhibitors Trade Review, December 13, 1924, 3)

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But Birth was not simply a profitable spectacle in Canada; it was a priv- ileged site for the construction of national identity during a pivotal moment in Canadian history. Exhibition and publicity practices reframed the film’s signifi- cance so that it could present what Paul Moore calls an “imported nationalism” by adapting a foreign cinematic tradition imbued with patriotic significance (the American epic blockbuster) to a new national context.25 Birth’s national premiere was held at the annual Central Canada Exhibition in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, where promotional materials distinguished the film’s exhibi- tion as a Canadian achievement that would contribute an “important innova- tion” and “big improvement” to the fair’s entertainment programming.26 When it played in smaller cities with all the trappings of prestige, Birth became a source of local pride.27 It is remarkable that Griffith’s ode to white America could so seamlessly be made Canadian, given Canada’s ideals of toleration and history of anti-Americanism inflamed by US neutrality in World War I. However, like British audiences, Canadians recognized their own national struggle in Birth’s realistic depiction of war, which supplemented a dearth of images from Europe’s frontlines.28 Birth even circulated as a recruitment device in Canada, with appeals for enlistment projected onscreen throughout its premiere run in Ottawa.29 From Saint John’s Opera House to Winnipeg’s Walker Theatre, Birth played in venues that doubled as recruitment halls, linking the film’s call to arms to the nation’s.30 In Toronto, officers paid for thousands of soldiers training at Exhibition Camp to see the film before being deployed.31

Griffith’s tale of a nation forged through war anticipated Canada’s expe- rience in World War I, commonly marked as the crisis through which Canada grew truly independent from the British Empire. Today’s Canadian passport features the words of Brigadier General A. E. Ross reflecting on the 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge when all four divisions of the Canadian Corps first fought together and defeated the German Army: “in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation.” Canadian leaders have often repeated that phrase, underscoring that the war cohered a sense of unique Canadian nationhood. Similarly, Griffith’s title expresses the notion that America emerged as a unified nation through the reassertion of white supremacy that followed the Civil War. Griffith adapts this premise from US President Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People, which he quotes throughout the film. Wilson was the first Southern president since the Civil War and, like Griffith and Dixon, sought to overcome lingering divisions between North and South by articulating a new nationalism that—as one of the film’s most notorious intertitles puts it—would bond “former enemies of North and South … reunited again in common defense of their Aryan birth- right.” Even Birth’s contributions to the art of montage, implementing parallel

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editing at an unprecedented scale, were dedicated to expressing how clashing elements could be united through shared antagonism.

Whereas Birth’s American tale failed to engage Australian audiences, its form of cinematic nation building resonated in another sprawling settler colony striving to outgrow its imperial progenitor.32 Sarah-Jane Mathieu has shown that in the late nineteenth century, rural Canada and the American South had a great deal in common, including tenuous new governments charting paths to modern statehood through “white supremacy as a rational model of modernity and civility.”33 Birth dramatized these histories by reminding white audiences of the racial groundwork on which their societies had predicated progress. While rural Canada resembled the South, urban Canada romanticized it in cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy. Canadian blackface performances, popular in official theater houses and community spaces such as high schools and churches, adapted American nostalgia to speak to local anxieties about modernization and immigration. Thompson demonstrates that these perfor- mances “delineate[d] real and imagined boundaries of belonging” to Canada by caricaturing Black people as premodern relics of a simpler time who were “out of place in the industrialized north.”34 Likewise, Birth—as an emblem of technocultural modernity mobilized in service of a lost past—assuaged anxiet- ies about a rapidly modernizing nation and its growing immigrant population with a narrative of ethnonational futurity. During this period, Birth and World War I presented Canadians with concurrent opportunities to solidify the porous boundaries of national belonging.

While Michael Hammond suggests that British interpretations of Birth downplayed its racial messages in favor of wartime themes, the Canadian case illustrates the extent to which these discourses were entangled.35 In 1915 and 1916, Black Canadians protested Birth while fighting for the right to enlist, seen as an opportunity to prove their eligibility for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. They were initially prevented from joining the Canadian military and, as the need for reinforcements grew, were eventually authorized to form a segregated construction battalion.36 An estimated half of its recruits were African Americans who had fled Jim Crow only to serve in a segregated army that starkly revealed the limits of Canadian inclusion.37 Unlike French censors and a small British opposition who worried that Birth would stoke hostility against the colonized Africans in their ranks, Canadians enlisted the film to support their war effort.38

For example, in Winnipeg, censors made cuts due to concerns that “the sight of women crying over … their husbands going to war” would hinder recruit- ment efforts.39 Rather than reject the film, nationalists repurposed its emotional force. They held a recruitment night at Winnipeg’s largest theater the evening

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before Birth premiered there in November 1915. Military bands and marching soldiers worked the audience up “to a condition of intense patriotic emotion” so that they were “in a receptive mood” when a church leader “delivered an impassioned speech on ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ giving a vivid and realistic depic- tion of one’s feelings while viewing the magnificent production,” followed by an appeal for recruits and a speech from the mayor.40 This event fused Canadian militarism and American white nationalism into a melodrama of duty. Williams explains that Birth connected “new feelings about race to equally new feelings about national identity.”41 Canadians then transposed those composited emo- tions to their context, producing the nation as an object of feeling that must be guarded against its constitutive others. As Marquis demonstrates, World War I recruitment efforts in Canada employed similar rhetorical strategies to Birth, evoking fears that defeat would result in German colonization of Canada and mass rape of Canadian women.42 Birth superimposed these two anxieties by merging racial and sexual paranoia so that the threat to the patriarchal family analogized the threat to the white nation, both of which demanded the same response: violence. Promoters emphasized that Birth conveyed both a “pictorial record” and “the spirit” of “War as it actually is,” inviting viewers to identify a documentary appeal in its battle scenes.43 But it was less Birth’s depiction of the Civil War than the ensuing race war—the reassertion of white supremacy during Reconstruction—that offered a template to white Canadians struggling to define their emerging nation’s identity through this period of national crisis.

BLACK PROTEST

Black Canadians responded to the danger Birth posed by demanding and per- forming full citizenship. In 1915, the vast majority of Black Canadians were descended from refugees formerly enslaved in the United States. Their histo- ries have often inspired Canadians to mythologize the nation as a safe haven of freedom from American racial tyranny, drawing on anti-Americanism to authenticate myths of Canadian benevolence. In migration narratives about the so-called Black Loyalists or the Underground Railroad, Black Canadians are characterized as foreigners in a welcoming nation rather than citizens who have contributed to and been persecuted by it for centuries. For Rinaldo Wal- cott, Canadian Blackness names an ambivalent “brew of desires for elsewhere, disappointments in the nation and the pleasures of exile.”44 Potential pleasure has long been tempered by disappointments in a nation that has practiced all-too-familiar forms of anti-Black racism, from enslavement to segregation to brutal policing. While Canadian white supremacy was not as violent in the 1910s as it was in the American South, this was not, as Mathieu has shown, “for want of trying” on the part of white Canadians.45 Eliding the similarities between

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Canada and the United States, the narrative of emancipatory migration north- ward functions in national mythmaking as a source of denial that discursively produces Canada as sanctuary by hyperbolizing the meaning of the border. As we will see, relentless comparatism and historical amnesia have coalesced into a powerful force entrenching Canadian anti-Blackness.

In the early twentieth century, Black and Indigenous people were deemed unfit for citizenship even as diverse groups of white settlers were being enfolded into an emerging national culture. Nonetheless, Canada’s abolitionist legacy and imperial identity based on British principles of civility and fair play suggested to many Black people that they might one day be meaningfully recognized as equal citizens. Despite ubiquitous discrimination, they mobilized the language of patriotism, Canadian exceptionalism, and imperial subjecthood to challenge the contours of Canadian belonging. When Black Canadians heard that Birth was scheduled to play across Canada, they conveyed their dissent in overtly nationalistic terms.

Protests organized through churches and community networks were registered against the film in all of Canada’s most populous cities, including Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Halifax, as well as smaller cities such as Saint John and Windsor. The extent of these protests is itself remarkable because Canada’s relatively small Black population possessed little political power and risked retaliatory violence in speaking out. However, they recognized that Birth’s widespread circulation would imperil their oppor- tunities and endanger their lives. The film glorified the KKK, promoted lynch- ing, and featured white actors in blackface depicting Black people as barbaric and sexually violent. The effects of this slander were exacerbated by Griffith’s innovations to a relatively new and realistic medium and his inclusion of his- torical facsimiles that contributed to Birth being received as historical fact. The danger was further compounded in Canada because demographic realities and segregationist policies ensured that most white Canadians living outside of major cities had only ever encountered Black people as villains in popular folk tales and political rhetoric.46 Birth threatened to synthesize those fantasies into a visually authenticated historical narrative. As Anna Everett succinctly puts it, these “moving pictures literally signified matters of life and death.”47 Black Canadians aimed their appeals at elected officials and censor boards that were explicitly tasked with defending Canadian nationalism against American cultural imperialism. With few avenues of dissent available to them, protestors invoked palatable values such as nationalism and morality, imploring white Canadians to live up to their national ideals.

In Toronto, Black organizers held a meeting on September 16, 1915, in anticipation of Birth’s premiere on the twentieth. They read a telegram from

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Ottawa, perhaps from G. K. Vernon, who had recently urged Ottawa’s Board of Control to cancel Birth’s premiere for depicting “the black race in a way which was most undesirable.”48 The telegram warned to “endeavor to stop if possible” because Birth’s racism “should not be tolerated in a country where liberty, jus- tice, and equality are not mere bywords.”49 The Canadian Observer published reports on the meeting and short opinion pieces that employed nationalis- tic reasoning to advocate that the film be censored. One contributor wrote: “We are here, under the British flag—emblem of Liberty and Right wherever it floats. Whatever may be allowed to the south of us is no reason for the same to be perpetrated here. The British flag is its own leader and does not require to learn from others void of backbone the right and wrong of things. Cut it out.”50 Another writer insisted that the screening “must be stopped in Canada if she is to remain worthy of the British flag that flies over her domains.”51 Drawing their moral authority from an imperial flag that “in theory represented racial equality,” these writers aligned their cause with allegiance to the empire under- girding Canadian nationhood.52

Other Black dissenters articulated the specifically Canadian nationalism that grew more prominent over the course of World War I. Windsor teacher Ada Kelly wrote: “Our Canada once held out its arms of protection to the slave. Will this same Canada rise up and protect the children of this liberated people? We are peaceful, law-abiding citizens and love our Canada, and do not wish the discordant features of the ‘Birth of a Nation’ to break our harmony with the other race.”53 Similarly, in Montreal, Reverend Arnold Gregory reasoned: “If it is forbidden in the United States,” as it was in a few jurisdictions, “how much more reason is there that it should be forbidden in Canada, to which our people fled for safety when persecuted in the United States?”54 Invoking the history of crossings that furnished Canada’s myth of compassion, Gregory, Kelly, and others advocated Birth’s censorship on patriotic grounds while challenging the nation to fulfill its own fantasy of racial equality.

Black institutions burgeoned during this era in Canada and the US and were in frequent communication with one another, sharing tactics, funds, and occasional success stories.55 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led the American fight against Birth, raising the orga- nization’s public profile during this period. The NAACP received applications for assistance from Black Canadians working to prevent local premieres and may also have taken a page from its Canadian allies when in 1917, as the US entered the war, it began voicing arguments against Birth as patriotic calls for national unity. 56 Birth ironically strengthened Black political networks as activism grew increasingly transnational, though local circumstances continued to inform what tactics would be most effective.

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Like the NAACP, Black Canadians warned that Birth would incite vio- lence. Speeches at a Montreal protest emphasized that the film threatened “in a most dangerous fashion to raise race feeling against the negro to the point of hatred; to glorify the doings of the Ku Klux Klan;” and “to justify the lynching of the negro.”57 Gregory analyzed descriptions of the film to demonstrate that Birth was historically inaccurate “in the most deadly manner.”58 Milton Fuller, a barber who headed Vancouver’s Negro Christian Alliance, wrote on the com- munity’s behalf: “Canada does not wish to see her citizens lynched, shot and burned by low-browed, half-witted individuals defying all law and order. Yet this shameful outrage will become a matter of history in Canadian national life if the picture-play called ‘The Birth of a Nation’ is allowed to be exhib- ited throughout Britain’s most promising oversea dominion.”59 Whereas Black Americans warned that Birth would cause underlying social discord to surface, Black Canadians made patriotic appeals to whites who conceived of racist vio- lence as a foreign problem that might disruptively invade Canada’s social order.

Despite this palatable rhetoric, only allies in Halifax and a white lawyer in Winnipeg answered calls that the protest “not only be made by our people, but by all who call for Canadian idealism and for the rights of man.”60 In the western provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, the social con- sensus was especially anti-Black. Refugees who had recently fled segregation, disfranchisement, and violence in Oklahoma were met by an outpouring of hostility from whites demanding that Black migrants be excluded and expelled from Canada.61 Protestors in these regions resorted to placing their faith in the neutrality of Canada’s institutions. In Winnipeg, they lodged complaints to local councils and officials, hoping that a protest “based on the ground of moral principle” would see “ justice … take its course.”62 For Black people in the Prairie Provinces to voice such seemingly normative appeals required incredible cour- age amid threats of deportation and extrajudicial violence.

British Canadian patriotism was unlikely to build support for a margin- alized cause in Quebec, regarded as a culturally endangered Catholic and fran- cophone minority within Canada. When Black Quebecers protested Birth, they often deployed the language of morality instead, which made their grievances legible to the censor board’s Catholic priorities. Tapping into contemporary fears about cinema’s moral influence on urban populations, they exploited the ambiguous definition of obscenity to foreground Birth’s violations of Catholic taboos. Black leaders presented Quebec’s chief censor with a community res- olution against the film, expressing their “emphatic protest” against Birth’s tendency to “promote racial antagonism and to defame the character of the women of our race.”63 The board’s president “promised to keep the complaint in mind” and later mandated cuts to scenes depicting the “pursuit of girl by negro,”

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“colored woman, immodestly dressed, drinking,” and “white girl in the arms of a mulatto”—racist scenes that contravened Catholic sexual mores.64 While Stokes is correct to point out that these cuts would eliminate Birth’s most racist scenes, this is only because Griffith racializes sexuality as a threat to white purity to be defended through white-supremacist terrorism. While these cuts would have deprived the film of its ideological fulcrums, some records suggest that the scenes were shown in Montreal despite censors’ objections.65

Black Canadians raised their opposition as a matter of patriotic concern by mobilizing discourses of nationalism, civility, and morality to frame Birth as an affront to Canadian ideals. That their demands were largely dismissed should not be taken to suggest that they were unsuccessful, as some have argued.66 These efforts deployed a form of critical patriotism that underscored and worked to close the gap between Canadian myth and reality while strengthening Black community organizations and networks across Canada. Insisted Gregory: “Even if our protest does not help any, it will show that we know when we are slapped in the face.”67

White Canada’s resistance to these forms of appeal demonstrates the insidiousness of Canadian racism. When a single Black Canadian viewer, Reverend Cecil Stewart, endorsed the film, its white proponents invoked the review as permission to ignore the grievances that predominated Black Canadian discourse about Birth. Stewart expressed “regret that the promoters and Board of Censors were made to feel that they had been sowing seeds of dissension” because Birth “is a marvel of production and tends to do honor to the negro even at the expense of the white man.”68 Griffith’s film provoked dis- agreement even among Black leaders, reflecting contentious debates over the means and meaning of racial uplift.69 These debates echoed in Black viewers’ diverse, sometimes contradictory responses to the films they saw. Jacqueline Stewart emphasizes that Black spectators’ encounters with cinema have always been open to “a range of possible responses” navigating between seemingly incommensurable perspectives, especially when a text peddles pleasures that radically contradict one’s own interests.70 This indeterminacy has been even more acute for those caught in the ambivalences that Walcott identifies between the pleasures and perils of being Black in Canada. When Black Canadian com- munities from Vancouver to Halifax adopted resolutions against Birth, they presented a consensus negotiated from many perspectives in contrast to Cecil Stewart’s individual voice. However, many of Birth’s white Canadian proponents tokenized Stewart’s conciliatory article as though it represented a broadly held view. In Vancouver, the premiere’s manager countered the Negro Christian Alliance’s resolution by having Stewart’s commentary republished in a local paper; the mayor then quoted Stewart during a city council debate at which he

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successfully advocated the film’s approval.71 While Black leaders speaking out against Birth modeled the kinds of civic concern that their communities were routinely denied, white leaders tokenizing Stewart feigned such concern to fortify their positions. As I elaborate in the next section, such gestures enabled Birth to circulate as a text that was compatible with Canadian civic ideals.

WHITE DENIALISM

E xcavating the g rounds on which Black protests were d ismissed, we uncover the log ics that have permitted white supremacy to thrive in Can- ada. A n exceptiona l example was the temporar y ban in Nova Scotia, where Canada’s largest Black popu lation held some politica l sway. Follow ing a March 1916 appea l to Ha lifa x’s Board of Control, a mu ltiracia l delegation v isited the prov incia l government to arg ue that Birth wou ld “prejudice the minds of the friends of the colored race against a defenceless minorit y of citizens.”72 A prov incia l censor v isited Moncton to v iew the f ilm and u ltimately the venue’s president ag reed to cancel the premiere “ in the interest of good feeling in the communit y.”73 However, this ban seems to have been partia l and informa l, motivated by electora l politics; April screenings were held in Pictou and New Glasgow regard less, w ith “spe- cia l train arrangements” for nearby tow ns.74 By Januar y 1917, a journa list

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Fig. 3: Advertisements for Birth’s belated Halifax premiere. (Halifax [Nova Scotia] Evening Mail, January 13, 1917; Halifax [Nova Scotia] Evening Mail, January 17, 1917)

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reported v ictor y over the “whims and fancies” of Nova Scotia’s Black pop- u lation: “Now that the election is over and the present off ice holders w ill r u le supreme for four years, the ban has been lif ted and ‘ The Bir th of Nation’ w ill have a triumpha l procession into the cit y.”75 The production was rushed from Winnipeg—“the longest jump ever made by a theatrica l company in Canada”—and politicians lef t a private screening unanimous “that the picture shou ld be show n w ithout cuts of any k ind.”76 Newspa- per ar ticles and publicit y underscored that Birth wou ld screen in Ha l- ifa x “w ithout cuts and exactly as g iven in a ll the big cities of Canada” (f ig. 3).77 Even where Black Canadians w ielded a sma ll deg ree of politica l power, their safet y was only a concern as long as their votes were.

Characterizing Black grievances as arbitrary and irrational, the jour- nalist quoted above exemplifies how Canadian gatekeepers excluded Black political speech from the arena of legitimacy. In Montreal, as in Moncton, Birth’s premiere was attended by some Black spectators—perhaps aligned with Cecil Stewart’s politics, perhaps trapped in the paradoxical position of what Everett calls “informant-spectator[s]” who faced the conundrum of having to endorse the film at the box office in order to form a credible opinion about it.78 The Gazette reported that despite their attendance, “there were no audible expressions of dissent, nor to the unprejudiced observer did there appear to be ground for any.”79 The notion that Black people were prejudiced against Birth (not the other way around) illustrates how the issue of censorship became itself racialized. In his pamphlet The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America, self- published in 1916 to defend Birth against “the root of all censorship”—“In- tolerance,” Griffith personifies censorship as a “malignant pygmy” that “has matured into a Caliban.”80 This racialized figure is pitted against the syn- thesized embodiment of free speech and America: a tall white woman but- tressed by “reason” and “history” who banishes censors from the state. In what David Rylance describes as a “masterpiece of rhetorical conflation,” Griffith’s pamphlet incorporates the binary opposition of censorship versus free speech into Birth’s racial logic, framing censorship as a contaminant and unbridled expression as a patriotic virtue that, like Griffith’s paranoid imagination of whiteness, can be lost if it is not defended.81 White Canadians also disquali- fied Black thought as being marked by innate, indelible prejudice. As Canada’s demographic contours stretched to populate expropriated land with settler bodies, Blackness constituted a limit against which an increasingly diverse body politic was made to cohere.

Not only was Black opposition dismissed as a menace to civil rights, but the seemingly equitable discourse of minority rights could also function to insulate white supremacy. As one columnist noted, Birth’s approval by censors

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was especially contradictory in Quebec, “where there is so much pretence about safeguarding the interests of minorities.”82 While Quebec’s censor board dili- gently protected the province’s religious sensibilities from Canada’s majority, the same concern was not extended to the Black minority within Quebec. The rhetoric of besiegement that guards Quebecois culture against Anglo-Canadian dominance ended up legitimating the oppression of minority groups within the province. (Ironically, the second Klan to which Birth gave rise would become anti-Catholic and antifrancophone, linked to terror attacks in Quebec.)

As these examples illustrate, Canadian endorsements of Griffith’s white nationalism were rarely explicitly racist. Instead, officials tacitly affirmed Birth’s worldview through racially preconditioned rights discourses and practices of deflection that allowed them to avoid conflict without resorting to explicit rac- ism. Perhaps the most literal instance of deflection occurred in Toronto, where a delegation of prominent Black leaders led by politician William Hubbard raised their objections to Toronto’s chief theater censor, who referred them to the provincial Board of Censors, which advised that they speak with the Board of Appeals, who sent them to the provincial treasurer, who was not in Toronto.83 The group eventually met with Ontario’s premier, who referred them back to the appeal board. Such disregard was unusual for this censor board, featured in a 1916 nonfiction reel jumping up and down in delight as they watch “40,000 feet (about 9 miles) of rejected film” lit ablaze by Toronto’s fire chief (fig. 4).84 That this film was even made indicates that Ontario censors were usually more enthusiastic about their vocation.

A similar rationale may have been operative in Windsor, home to a large Black population who lodged their opposition with municipal and provin- cial officials and were preparing an injunction when Birth’s planned run was abruptly cancelled. Despite the legal basis for the cancellation—the manager defied contractual prohibitions against foreign patronage by advertising across the river in Detroit—it was suspected that officials were looking to avoid a racial confrontation.85 “Fight Is Ours,” reported the Canadian Observer.86 Within a year, however, Birth played in Windsor against renewed objections, with the initial opposition defused and the momentum of nationwide triumph at its back.87

The most common form of def lection was rhetorical: redirecting responsibility for Birth ’s racism to the United States. For example, Ontario’s chief censor explained that Birth “simply treats one period of histor y in the United States, w ith which neither England nor Canada had any part” and therefore had “no objectionable features from a national standpoint.”88 Similarly, theater managers remarked that the premiere had no “national bearing” because “the only troops shown are American.”89 Such justif ications

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Fig. 4: Stills from a short film by photographer William James in which Ontario censors George Armstrong, Robert Wilson, and John Burns celebrate the ignition of nine miles of censored nitrate. “[Forty Thousand Feet of Rejected Film Destroyed by Ontario Censor Board] (1916)” (William James Sr. fonds/IDCISN: 130532, Library and Archives Canada)

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were founded on the assumption that fundamental differences between Canada and the US inoculated Canadians against American racism. In fact, Canada’s decentralized censorship apparatus was united under that ver y assumption: a common mandate to guard Canadian nationalism against American cultural imperialism. This v iew presupposed the existence of radical differences between the two countries that must be protected, yet paradoxically, that putative difference became the ver y premise on which censors, politicians, and journalists based their defenses of a Canadian right to enjoy racist American cinema.

Although, as we have seen, Birth’s Canadian paratexts imported its nationalism north, many insisted that the film bore no relevance to the national context because it was neither about the present nor about Canada and thus completely extraneous to Canadian actuality. A writer for the Calgary (Alberta) Herald claimed that it was “as foolish for the enlightened colored people of the twentieth century to feel themselves brothers of those depicted in Civil War times as it would be for Darwin to consider himself a fit companion for a mon- key.”90 This writer also references an intertitular disclaimer in Griffith’s film: “This is an historical presentation … and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today.” Yet the way that nationalism—and the very concept of the nation—functions is precisely by glossing over such discontinuities between past and present, between here and there, to cohere a totality united by a com- mon geography, history, and future.91 Birth is a master class in the construc- tion of nationhood; it narrates a myth designed to circulate as a history of the present and makes groundbreaking use of parallel editing to forge the principle of simultaneity that Benedict Anderson identifies as an enabling condition of the national imaginary.92 Canadian performances of nation building from blackface minstrelsy to Birth’s exhibition grounded themselves in historical continuity.

Some did promote a more explicitly white-supremacist position. For instance, an Ontario tobacco industrialist from North Carolina endorsed enslavement while bemoaning the “cruelty” of having “taught” Black people “that there is a remote possibility anywhere in the dim distant future that they shall ever stand on an equal social or political footing with the Anglo-Saxon.”93 Urging all Canadians to see Birth, he threatened Black protestors to “remem- ber that Anglo-Saxon blood has dominated always and everywhere and that the Canadian people will not be dictated to by a handful of negroes as to the nature of the theatrical performances that they will see or hear.”94 Such bigotry is easy to repudiate. Yet not only was it published by a major newspaper; it also expresses the very worldview that all of Birth’s tacit supporters helped to promote.

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For example, we find a very different commentary on Birth in a Toronto review that echoes the Calgary writer: “No negro who respects himself or his race will find anything in the recital that he need be ashamed of. Rather it is cause for pride … that the negro race in little more than half a century should have risen to the height which the closing pictures of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ illustrate.”95 These closing pictures are known as the Hampton Epilogue, culled from a film produced by the Hampton Institute depicting Black progress since Reconstruction and quick ly appended to Birth as a means of appeasing American—and apparently, Canadian—censors. The institute intended this short film to serve as a corrective to Birth ’s disparag- ing representations of Black people, but it was widely perceived (including by that reviewer) as being part of the text, as elaborating Birth ’s vision of white supremacy into a segregated and paternalistic present.96 The epilogue’s absorption into Griffith’s film illustrates how ideologies of eventual, super- vised progress simply reinforced Birth ’s worldview. When white Canadians defended the film by pointing to the epilogue as evidence that racial prog- ress had been made, and by insisting that Birth ’s distant American past was nothing like the Canadian present, they ensured that the opposite would remain true.97 Although ethnonationalist propaganda and ideologies of grad- ual progress can be discursively counterposed, in practice they worked in tandem to circulate Birth ’s hateful message and entrench the conditions of Canadian anti-Blackness.

For white nationalists and white liberals alike, Black protests disturbed cherished myths about the nation. A “prominent member” of Canada’s Red Cross insisted that “patriotic societies are not paying any attention to [the protests]” because “any offence [Birth] could give to the colored people must surely be slight.”98 Many echoed this view that Black protests against Birth were not only unwarranted but also unpatriotic, suggesting that placative stipulations preconditioned Black people’s access to the category Canadian. Recalling the ways that white Canadians have often been more alarmed by accusations of racism than racism itself, the mainstream Canadian press largely characterized Black grievances during this period as threats to civic order; they narrated American protests against the film as though Birth threatened to incite Black—not white—political violence.99 By doubly dis- placing the responsibility for racial conflict onto the United States, then onto Black people themselves, these accounts reversed protestors’ warnings to claim that Blackness, not Birth, posed the danger to Canadian society. As I show in the concluding section, this reversal was not unusual but encap- sulates how the era’s emerging Canadian ideals were erected on anti-Black foundations.

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CANADA’S COLOR LINES

As Birth toured Canada, the nation was governed by the Conservative govern- ment of Robert Borden, who won the 1911 election on an explicitly nativist and xenophobic platform. Yet the Liberal government of his predecessor Wilfrid Laurier had already implemented measures restricting people of color’s ability to immigrate to Canada, even as his administration desperately courted Amer- ican and European settlers. These measures included efforts to ban all Black migration to Canada, leading W. E. B. Du Bois to conclude that Canada did in fact have a color line—traced along its southern border.100 Canada’s superin- tendent of immigration justified the plan as being “not only in the interest of Canada, but also in the interest of coloured people themselves,” reframing rac- ism as humanitarianism by arguing that the exclusion of Black migrants would protect them from experiencing racism in Canada.101 Whereas Black leaders worried that Birth would spread American racism around the world, Canadian government officials were concerned that Black migrants themselves would bring anti-Black racism across the border. Despite being the custodians of a purported safe haven, they justified racist border practices—denying asylum to African American refugees fleeing racial terror—as benevolent actions designed to prevent racism from being perpetrated against them in Canada. Nonetheless, rhetorical differences distinguished Laurier from Borden, white liberal from white conservative. Whereas Borden’s campaign slogan in British Columbia bla- tantly advocated “A White Canada,” Laurier’s administration worked carefully to exclude Black migrants without explicitly being racist through a combination of euphemisms, bribes, and paternalistic platitudes.102 Concurrently, charitable organizations worried that Black migration would tarnish the nation’s brand by forcing white Canadians to commit white-supremacist lynchings.103 Like government officials, they posited racial discord as an effect of Black existence and anti-Black violence as an inevitable reaction to Black presence. While most white Canadians did not explicitly condone such violence, many contributed to its enabling conditions by clinging to nationalist fantasies of benevolence, civility, and Canadian exceptionalism that suppressed the claims of those who experienced Canada otherwise.

The color line at Canada’s border was supplemented by internal partitions that segregated Black Canadians from centers of public life in which the nation’s civic ideals were coming to be defined. Black protestors underscored the con- tradictions of Canadian idealism by drawing attention to such practices, explic- itly relating American racism to its Canadian parallels—something the white press rarely did. Describing the racial injury inflicted when the “misery of the terrible years of the past is thrown onto a screen,” a Toronto writer recounted:

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“the white brother, whenever the opportunity seems to offer, fires dirty water in [the Black man’s] face in more ways than one. He is tabooed from enjoying the pleasures of a twenty five cent seat in most places of amusement, he is thrown out thru the back of hotel doors, he is segregated to a corner severely his own.”104 Refuting fantasies of inclusion, this testimony calls attention to the practices of segregation that structured both American and Canadian modernity. Similarly, Arthur King, secretary of Montreal’s Union Progressive League, wondered about the implications of sowing racial conflict while the nation was at war: “Is this not the time when everything should be done to create solidarity among all classes and races of the community? Must we, in these days, inform our people in other parts of the world that we are publicly insulted and humiliated in this way here?”105 King’s exclusion from the solidarity implied by Canada’s wartime ideals informed his critical, even internationalist perspective. As Jacqueline Stewart demonstrates, African American spectators have always had to be crit- ical viewers, in part because segregated theater seating denied them the kinds of total absorption predicated on forgetting one’s identity that characterize classical models of cinematic spectatorship.106 In Canada, segregated theater balconies contradicted the notion that the racism depicted onscreen was a foreign problem, just as serving in a segregated battalion attenuated any sense of inclusion that Black Canadians may have felt in the emerging nation. The differences between the birth of a nation witnessed from the ranks of Canada’s segregated army and that viewed from the balcony of a segregated theater were negligible.

Birth continued to shape the nation that emerged through this period as the imaginary threat of the Black male rapist became a staple of ethnonation- alist discourse. While this trope has appeared in Canadian political rhetoric since being invoked by the nation’s first prime minister, Birth popularized the narrative that consolidates the sexual and racial dimensions of white patriar- chal paranoia into a thrilling visual spectacle.107 The figure of the Black rapist who threatens daughter and nation became a recurring trope used to justify Canada’s racist border practices and by the 1920s was informing drug legislation and policing.108 Birth also instigated the rise of the KKK of Kanada, which estab- lished local chapters in every major city and countless smaller ones, command- ing political influence in Saskatchewan’s legislature and committing violence across the nation.109 In 1930, Oakville’s Klan targeted a marriage between a white woman and a man perceived to be Black who claimed Indigenous heri- tage; this only begins to indicate how Birth’s logics of negative cohesion could be configured against other racialized groups—an important area for future research given the genocidal imperatives undergirding the Canadian project and the anti-Asian racism structuring the era’s politics in British Columbia.110

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Following a rare effort to prosecute Klan violence in Canada, Ontario judges denounced the Oakville men’s lawlessness without mentioning race or racism; Constance Backhouse suggests that these elites objected less to the Klan’s racist beliefs than to its importation of American problems into Canadian society.111 Even as white-supremacist violence intensified across the nation in Birth’s wake, Canadian leaders continued to dismiss it as an American problem.

As the KKK’s Canadian membership grew exponentially through the 1920s, a new metaphor was used to describe Canadian diversity: the mosaic. This term has come to emblematize national ideals such as multiculturalism and inclusion that seem diametrically opposed to the white supremacy of the Klan. However, in its originary articulation as a metaphor for nation building, the mosaic was to be constructed of tiles “from British stock or from among the more readily assimilable peoples of Europe.”112 When the roots of Canadian multiculturalism were being sown, it was not a posthierarchical fantasy but rather a technique of governance self-consciously borrowed from the British Empire to bolster Canada’s image as an independent colonial power and to manage differences explicitly understood as problems.113 As Richard Day has tracked, in the early twentieth century this new approach to diversity was used to justify Canada’s practices of exclusion, deportation, segregation, and disenfranchisement based on “a desire for unity and identity achieved through rational bureaucratic action said to be in harmony with liberal ideals.”114 Letting Birth in and keeping Black refugees out were both seen as ways of fostering such unity. Whether banning Black refugees from Canada to protect them from rac- ism or endorsing white nationalist cinema for depicting how far Black people have progressed, liberal ideals equipped projects of white supremacy with a benevolent façade. As the case of Birth in Canada illustrates, national ideals promoting Canadian exceptionalism, equality, tolerance, and civility institu- tionalized white denialism in the 1910s, so intoxicating to their adherents that evidence of their fictitious status was to be rigorously disavowed. While these ideals described a Canadian fantasy opposed to American racial tyranny, in practice they maintained oppressive conditions while obstructing efforts to address the material facts of anti-Black racism.

The Birth of a Nation triumphed across Canada despite national myths founded on Canada’s differences from Griffith’s worldview. Acutely aware of this gap between Canadian myth and reality, Black protestors practiced a form of critical patriotism aimed at narrowing it. However, the national ideals that protestors invoked functioned for white Canadians as reassuring mechanisms of denial into which even Birth could be assimilated as evidence of social prog- ress and Canadian exceptionalism. In a duplication of Birth’s scapegoat narra- tive, white Canadians perceived Black people as unassimilable threats to those

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ideals—not only in their protests against Birth, but across many sites of early twentieth-century Canadian nation building, from immigration to enlistment to municipal, provincial, and federal politics. White Canadians leveraged Birth to experience audiovisual pleasure, to stimulate a burgeoning industry, and to cohere an emerging nation at the expense of Black Canadians, who began to invest in different strategies.

In 1919, demobilization delays left the Black battalion and white working- class Canadian soldiers stranded in British port cities, in impoverished camps lacking basic supplies. As conditions worsened, newspapers reported that emboldened Black veterans returning home across the empire were stealing white women and jobs.115 The lethal blend of patriarchal anxiety and racial paranoia familiar to all who had seen Birth sparked race riots in the camps. Although these events were overdetermined by many intersecting factors, Birth had recently consolidated them in a single cultural text that rationalized and romanticized anti-Black violence as the necessary response to imperiled white masculinity—a response legitimated as a noble defense of the nation. These events prompted Black Canadians to reassess their own investments in the nation. Canada’s vulnerability to American cultural imperialism has often fostered, according to Walcott, “a retreat to discourses of nationalism which become short-sighted in terms of the transnational political identifi- cations that might be crucially necessary.”116 Although Walcott writes from a different historical perspective, Black protestors denouncing Birth in the 1910s may also have reiterated those discourses at the expense of the kinds of “diasporic connectedness and intimacy” that Walcott identifies as casualties of Canadian nationalism.117 Segregated military service culminating in race riots disillusioned Black Canadians who had enlisted in the hopes of accessing equal citizenship only to find that their fellow servicemen might kill them if the enemy on the battlefield did not.118 These events deepened racial consciousness among Black Canadians, whose activism became more international and less conciliatory, defined increasingly by transnational solidarity.119 Campaigns targeting Birth may have failed to persuade white Canadians against glorifying anti-Black violence across Canada, but they succeeded in strengthening Black Canadian institutions, political networks, and imaginaries that would support the increasing militancy of demands for racial justice for decades to come.

Notes

I am grateful to Ally Field, Jackie Stewart, Simran Bhalla, Emma Pask, and an anonymous reviewer for their incisive comments on previous versions of this essay. Participants in the Mass Culture Workshop and attendees of the Film Studies Association of Canada’s 2019 conference in Vancouver also provided

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helpful suggestions. Thanks to Dennis Moore and Elizabeth Price at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario and Elliott Gish and staff at the Halifax Central Library for their assistance. First epigraph: Quoted in James W. St. G. Walker, Racial Discrimination in Canada: The Black Experience (Ottawa: The Canadian Historical Association Historical Booklet No. 41, 1985), 4. Second epigraph: Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2017), 4.

1. Cheryl Thompson, “Trudeau Survived. Now Stop Pretending Canada Is a Diverse Paradise,” New York Times, October 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/opinion/trudeau-canada-election- racism.html.

2. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 109.

3. Historical records regarding audience size and total revenue are incomplete; some estimates suggest that the film has been seen by more than two hundred million people worldwide and, adjusted for inflation, remains the most profitable of all time. See Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Picture of All Time” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3, 287n1; and Williams, Playing the Race Card, 97.

4. Melvyn Stokes, “D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 76–106.

5. Greg Marquis, “A War within a War: Canadian Reactions to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Histoire sociale/Social History 94 (2014): 421–42.

6. David K. Billings, “‘Birth of a Nation’ Draws Canadians,” Moving Picture World, October 9, 1915, 307.

7. Advertisements, Toronto Globe, September 16, 1915; and Toronto Star, September 11, 1915.

8. Stokes, “Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” 76.

9. E. R. Parkhurst, “Birth of a Nation,” Toronto Globe, September 21, 1915, 6; and “Theatres,” Toronto Star, October 2, 1915, 7.

10. “Theatres,” Toronto Star, October 2, 1915, 7.

11. Billings, “Birth of a Nation,” 307.

12. “The Birth of a Nation,” Toronto Star, January 6, 1916, 10.

13. “Plans of Princess Unchanged by Fire,” Montreal Gazette, September 24, 1915, 4.

14. “Plans of Princess Unchanged by Fire,” 4; “Princess Theatre Burned in Montreal,” Toronto Globe, September 24, 1915, 5; and “Colored People Against Film Play,” Montreal (Quebec) Gazette, Sep- tember 23, 1915, 4.

15. Quoted in Pierre Hébert, Yves Lever, and Kenneth Landry, Dictionnaire de la censure au Québec: Littérature et cinema (Québec: Éditions Fides, 2006), 84–85, my translation. See also “Stays Another Week,” Montreal (Quebec) Gazette, October 1, 1915, 3; and “Picture for Third Week,” Montreal (Quebec) Gazette, October 9, 1915, 14.

16. “B. S. Courtney Here with ‘Nation’ Film,” Moving Picture World, October 28, 1916, 590; and “‘Nation’ Film with Good Orchestra,” Moving Picture World, December 9, 1916, 1536.

17. See “Nation’s Film on Circuit,” Moving Picture World, October 30, 1915, 998; “Film Has Packed Empire Theatre at Every Show,” Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) Star, March 11, 1916, 5; and “Special Trains on Dominion Atlantic Railway for ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Herald, January 24, 1917.

18. “Why Mae Marsh Is Popular,” Motography, May 12, 1917, 994.

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19. “Breezy Vacation Reading,” Toronto Star, August 1, 1918, 12.

20. “ʻBirth of a Nation’ Makes New Record,” Moving Picture World, January 26, 1918, 553.

21. Advertisement, Exhibitors Trade Review, December 13, 1924, 3; and Harry Kerry, “Are You Kicking In or Cashing In? Tried and Proved Pictures Are Sure Money Gatherers,” Exhibitors Trade Review, December 27, 1924, 121.

22. See Paul Moore, Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 202.

23. Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939 (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1992), 82.

24. E. R. Parkhurst, “Birth of a Nation,” Toronto Globe, June 15, 1920, 9.

25. Paul Moore, “Nationalist Film-Going without Canadian-Made Films?,” in Early Cinema and the “National,” ed. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 159.

26. “Costly Photoplay at Ottawa Fair,” Ottawa (Ontario) Journal, August 4, 1915, 7; and “Exhibition Management Decides to Lower Price Admission to Night Show,” Ottawa (Ontario) Journal, August 18, 1915, 2.

27. “As Good as New York,” St. John (New Brunswick) Standard, April 19, 1916; and “The Birth of a Nation,” Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) Saturday Press and Prairie Farm, March 4, 1916, 6.

28. Michael Hammond, “‘A Soul Stirring Appeal to Every Briton’: The Reception of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ in Britain (1915–1916),” Film History 11, no. 3 (1999): 353–70; Stokes, “Transnational and Historical Perspectives”; “Birth of a Nation,” Victoria (British Columbia) Colonist, November 19, 1916; and “Win- nipeg Censors Pass ‘Nation’ after Making Weird ‘Cut,’” Motion Picture News, November 20, 1915, 71.

29. “An Appeal for Recruits,” Ottawa (Ontario) Journal, September 14, 1915.

30. “Military Night at the Opera House,” St. John (New Brunswick) Standard, March 3, 1916.

31. “Military Men Invited to View ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Windsor (Ontario) Evening Record, October 12, 1916, 10.

32. Stokes, “Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” 91–92.

33. Sarah-Jane Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 15.

34. Cheryl Thompson, “Locating ‘Dixie’ in Newspaper Discourse and Theatrical Performance in Toronto, 1880s to 1920s,” Canadian Review of American Studies 49, no. 2 (2019): 208, 210.

35. Hammond, “A Soul Stirring Appeal,” 357.

36. See Melissa Shaw, “‘Most Anxious to Serve Their King and Country’: Black Canadians’ Fight to Enlist in WWI and Emerging Race Consciousness in Ontario, 1914–1919,” Histoire sociale/Social History 49, no. 100 (2016): 543–80.

37. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 107–8.

38. See Stokes, “Transnational and Historical Perspectives.”

39. “Winnipeg Censors Pass ‘Nation’ after Making Weird ‘Cut,’” 71.

40. “A Stirring Performance,” Moving Picture World, December 18, 1915, 2228.

41. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 100.

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42. Marquis, “War within a War,” 432.

43. “Film Masterpiece Shown at Arena,” 2.

44. Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003), 27.

45. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 16.

46. Mathieu, 14.

47. Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 104.

48. “Objects to Pictures ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Ottawa (Ontario) Journal, September 10, 1915, 14.

49. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ as Played in Ottawa, Ont,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario), September 18, 1915, 1.

50. Remler, “That Photo Film Have It Cut Out It Is Unnecessary,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario), September 18, 1915, 1–2.

51. “Dixon’s Play a Scene of Skilful Treachery,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario), September 18, 1915, 4.

52. Shaw, “Fight to Enlist,” 549.

53. “Held Mass Meeting to Prohibit Play Birth of a Nation,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario), December 4, 1915, 2.

54. “Colored People Against Film Play,” 4.

55. “Contributions to the Anti-Lynching Fund,” Crisis 13, no. 1 (1916): 16; and “Dixon’s Play a Scene of Skilful Treachery,” 4.

56. See Stephen Weinberger, “‘The Birth of a Nation’ and the Making of the NAACP,” Journal of American Studies 45, no. 1 (2011): 92; and Stokes, A History, 229–30.

57. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Causes a Furore,” Ottawa (Ontario) Citizen, September 24, 1915, 5.

58. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Causes a Furore,” 5.

59. “Negro Residents Protest,” Vancouver (British Columbia) World, December 18, 1915, 15.

60. “Skilful Treachery,” 4. See “‘Birth of a Nation’ Barred in Halifax,” Chicago Defender, May 13, 1916; and “Colored Citizens Making Protest,” Winnipeg (Manitoba) Free Press, November 12, 1915, 7.

61. Mathieu, North of the Color Line.

62. “Colored Citizens Making Protest,” 7; and E. J. Henry, “A Protest,” Winnipeg (Manitoba) Tribune, November 13, 1915, 4.

63. “Colored People Against Film Play,” 4.

64. “Protest Against Film,” Montreal Gazette, September 21, 1915; and Hébert, Lever, and Landry, Dic- tionnaire de la censure au Québec, 83–84, my translation.

65. “A Censor’s Range of Vision,” Ottawa (Ontario) Citizen, October 6, 1915, 12.

66. For example, see Arthur Lennig, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Film History 16, no. 2 (2004): 117–41.

67. “Colored People Against Film Play,” 4.

68. C. A. Stewart, “The Lesson a Clergyman Draws from the Photo Play,” Montreal Gazette, October 5, 1915, 2.

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69. See Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

70. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 101.

71. “Colored Clergyman Defends Film Play,” Vancouver (British Columbia) World, December 20, 1915; and “Film Passed by Alderman,” Vancouver (British Columbia) World, December 24, 1915.

72. “Will Not Be Shown in Halifax,” Moncton (New Brunswick) Times, April 6, 1916, 6; minutes of Halifax Board of Control, March 20, 1916, Halifax Municipal Archives; and “Protest Against ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Herald, March 21, 1916.

73. “Colored Citizens of Halifax Object to ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Moncton (New Brunswick) Times, March 30, 1916, 8; and “Will Not Be Shown in Halifax,” 6.

74. Advertisement, Pictou (Nova Scotia) Advocate, April 8, 1916, 5; Eastern Chronicle (Pictou, NS), April 7, 1916, 4; and Eastern Chronicle (Pictou, NS), April 11, 1916, 1. Thanks to John MacLeod and Anne Williams at Nova Scotia Archives for their assistance with this reference.

75. Frederick F. Sully, “Election Now Safe, ‘Nation’ Film Can Show,” Moving Picture World, January 20, 1917, 397.

76. “The Birth of a Nation,” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Evening Mail, January 18, 1917.

77. “The Birth of a Nation,” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Evening Mail, January 18, 1917.

78. Everett, Returning the Gaze, 90; “Bluenose Censor Sees Show in Moncton,” Moncton (New Brunswick) Transcript, March 30, 1916, 2; and “Film Masterpiece Shown at Arena,” 2.

79. “Film Masterpiece Shown at Arena,” 2.

80. D. W. Griffith, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (Los Angeles: self-pub., 1916), 3.

81. David Rylance, “Breech Birth: The Receptions to D. W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Australasian Journal of American Studies 24, no. 2 (2005): 16.

82. “A Censor’s Range of Vision,” 12.

83. “Colored Men Protest Against Film Drama,” Toronto Daily Star, September 14, 1915, 3; “Ex-Controller after Film,” Toronto Daily Star, September 18, 1915, 5; and “Hearst Sends Inspector,” Toronto Daily Star, September 20, 1915, 2.

84. William James, “[Forty Thousand Feet of Rejected Film Destroyed by Ontario Censor Board] (1916),” YouTube video, 1:14, posted by Library and Archives Canada, October 1, 2015, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=bEyKLtdzg_g. Original available at Library and Archives Canada, William James, Sr. fonds, 1974–0144, IDC 130532.

85. Jacob Smith, “Failed to Notice Clause in Contract,” Moving Picture World, December 11, 1915, 2044; and “Cancellation of Film Heads Off Legal Struggle,” Windsor (Ontario) Star, December 3, 1915, 6.

86. “Fight Is Ours,” Canadian Observer (Toronto, Ontario), December 4, 1915.

87. “Negroes Ask Recensor of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” London (Ontario) Advertiser, October 10, 1916, 5; and “Military Men Invited To View ‘Birth of a Nation,’” 10.

88. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Not Objectionable,” Toronto Star, September 15, 1915, 2.

89. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Not Objectionable,” 2.

90. “The Birth of a Nation,” Calgary (Alberta) Herald, December 7, 1915, 7.

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91. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

92. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24, 188. Michael Hammond draws this connection in “‘A Soul Stirring Appeal to Every Briton.’”

93. William Gregory, “Reply to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Says Southerner in Canada of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” London (Ontario) Advertiser, November 2, 1915, 6.

94. Gregory, “Reply to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’” 6.

95. “Birth of Nation Beyond Promises,” Toronto World, September 21, 1915, 7.

96. See Field, Uplift Cinema, 151–84.

97. Additional examples of such defenses are recorded in Marquis, “War within a War,” 440; and Stokes, “Transnational and Historical Perspectives,” 77–78

98. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Not Objectionable,” 2.

99. Paul McEwan comments on this reversal in “Lawyers, Bibliographies, and the Klan: Griffith’s Resources in the Censorship Battle over The Birth of a Nation in Ohio,” Film History 20, no. 3 (2008): 359.

100. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 39–40.

101. Quoted in Agnes Calliste, “Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Carib- bean, 1900–1932,” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 4 (1993–94): 136.

102. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 42; and Maynard, Policing Black Lives, 36.

103. See James W. St. G. Walker, “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 127.

104. Remler, “Photo Film,” 1–2.

105. “Colored People Against Film Play,” 4.

106. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 106–10.

107. See Barrington Walker, Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 116.

108. See Maynard, Policing Black Lives; and Emily Murphy, The Black Candle (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1922).

109. Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and James Pitsula, Keeping Canada British: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013).

110. Backhouse, Colour-Coded, 173–225.

111. Backhouse, 222.

112. Kate Foster quoted in Richard Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 153.

113. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity. See also Eve Haque, Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); and Katherine McKittrick, “Wait Canada Anticipate Black,” CLR James Journal 20, no. 1 (2014): 243–49.

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114. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity, 144.

115. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 115–17.

116. Walcott, Black Like Who?, 33.

117. Walcott, 33.

118. Mathieu, North of the Color Line, 100–142.

119. Shaw, “Fight to Enlist.”

Sasha Crawford-Holland is a PhD student and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Sasha’s writing on the politics of media is published in Television & New Media, Synoptique, and American Quarterly, and received Screen’s Annette Kuhn Essay Award for best debut article.

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